Now Pete Rose Is Helping Microsoft Scare People Away From Google Apps

AP ImagesBaseball great Pete Rose, who was banned from baseball for life in 1989 for gambling on the sport while managing the Cincinnati Reds, made a cameo appearance in a new Microsoft ad.

The ad claims using Google Docs is like gambling in a Las Vegas casino.

Actor Rob Schneider also stars in the ad as a casino dealer running a game called, you guessed it, Google Docs. The object is to open a Microsoft Office presentation in Google Docs without losing data or running into messy formatting errors, and the prize is a shiny key chain.

Of course, when Schneider lures a player to the table, he loses immediately because Microsoft and Google are like the Hatfields and McCoys of the productivity software market and haven't shown any interest in getting their respective file formats to work well with each other. And both blame each other for this.

When Schneider tries to get Rose to play, the 72-year old former baseball star waves him away and says: "No, no, no, it's too big a gamble — even for me."

Rose's appearance is self-effacing and funny, though it's probably not going to endear him to the forces in Major League Baseball who've been fighting his efforts at reinstatement. This would be a necessary first step before Rose can be inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame.

Here's the video: